Why Does Ancestry.com Better Copies and Better Indexing of Census Records Than FS?
Here's just one of many examples. Doing a search of 1850 Boone County Indiana Census records, I couldn't find my ancestor John Mahony. But I easily found it on Ancestry.com. It turns out that the copy on Ancestry.com is clear and bright, while the copy on FS is dark and practically illegible. John Mahony was indexed on Ancestry, while it turns out he was only indexed as John (no surname), because the indexer couldn't read the surname. (I used Edit to correct the index on FS.)
Why does Ancestry.com have a much better copy of the Census than FS? And why is their index different than FS? Does each organization film the Census records separately and do their own indexing? See screen shots below.
Ancestry.com
FamilySearch
Answers
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Sometimes it's the opposite - an image will be far more legible on FS than on Ancestry. And, at times, the image of the same record on FindMyPast is superior to both Ancestry and FS.
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Thank you, Aine. My question is why? Does each organization film the Census records separately and do their own indexing? Here is another example, where Ancestry indexed the record correctly (Thomas F Lanam) but FS indexed the record as Thomas F Saname, which prevented me from finding it by name search. Obviously, two different people indexed the same record. Why isn't there a single index for Census records? Thank you.
Ancestry.com
FamilySearch
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In some cases, the organizations do share an indexing project. In my opinion, thank goodness they don't always. Sometimes we CAN find a record because the indexing was done in a different way on one site from the other.
Also, the search engines on the various sites are not programmed in the same way, so how we enter our search parameters may give us different results on one site from the other.
Ancestry, FindMyPast, MyHeritage and others are for-profit companies. FamilySearch is free to all.
In some cases, newer methods allow one of the organizations to create a better image. I read just this past week about new scans of Canadian records that will be of great help to Canadian research.
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